Google SEO News and Discussion Forum

From past week or so I have started to see some strange reports in my WMT. It has started to report 404 errors that do not exist anymore (they were earlier). Upon clicking the link to find pages that link to them, I find the cache date of 1st week of Nov-08 adjacent to those pages, when all those pages are indexed with in a span of last one week itself.

Also, in the content analysis tab, it is showing short titles and descriptions for pages, say www.example.com/file.html while when I click on this page the link points to www.example.com/file (without .html) and throws a 404. BTW, the page (www.example.com/file.html) do exist and has title and description which is not short or long.

I've finally learned not to panic over errors reported in GMT, except of course for the dreaded highlighted "WARNING". Generally anything similar to your problem will sort itself out and go away in a few weeks.

It is not a bug. Google has a big database listing URLs they have discovered. That database is many times bigger than their public index. They revisit all of the URLs in the big list from time to time to see what their status is - revisiting pages that have gone 404 for several years after that happens. They do this because it is always possible that a new page might reappear at that old URL.

When they do this, the results of the recent check appear in WMT for a few days and then drop out. I have seen this several times before and it has never been an issue.